.....You are trying to tell me that if I wrote an editor to edit.zag files and compiled it on MacOSX that MacOSX would automagically know that my program reads.zag files and would use it to open all.zag files.......
No, you would have to tell your program to notify your system upon first run what suffix and/or hidden creator and type codes your program understands. After that, if the user wants to open a.zag file, the system will start your program and tell it to read in that file.
I am not a programmer intimately knowledgeable about the internal details of OSX, but I do know that many, if not most of the programs I added to my system do NOT need to run any kind of installation program. Even Microsoft office is just simple drag and drop from the original CD. System updates and some programs use installers, but whether or not that is so, is up to the program developer. This has always been that way at least from system 7 on. An installer can be used, but it is an optional choice of the programmers. I had some old Windows 95 programs that also simply had to be copied from the source disk to the HD. Installers were needed back then mostly to stitch all the parts of a larger program together from multiple floppy disks. Today, where software is distributed on spacious media, special installer programs are an echo from the past.
Most CDs are sealed with some type of shrink wrap. The store may not be able to sell a CD the seal of which has been ripped away. Therefore a real loss has ocurred. No seal was broken on a downloaded copy and so there was no loss.
That rigamarole is neccessary for Windows, but not for Macs. Macs don't have a registry. When Mac users drag an icon of a program from a CD or disk image to any mounted drive they have write permission to, all the files that program needs are copied at the same time. User specific settings and values are established upon the first run of that program by that user. That information is stored in the users LIBRARY folder. Registration information or codes, if any, are entered at first run and get stored with the program so that all users that have access to it may use it.
Mac programs also "know" what files types they can open. Macs can, but don't have to use a three or four letter file extension. There are hidden type and creator codes that can tell the system which program to use for any file. If the system cannot find a program that it "'thinks" can open a given file, the user is given the opportunity to make an educated guess. There is no need to normally associate file types with programs, although if several programs can open a certain kind of file, the user may set which program should be the default. There are many Mac programs that do use an installer program, but most do not.
Because Mac programs are not scattered all over a HD, uninstallation is done by simply dragging the unwanted program icon into the trash. Device drivers, because they are embedded deeper in the sytem than applications, often do have an uninstall program just to make it easier for the user.
....Making the need to download installers for free software an extra effort....
Why does there have to be some special installer program just to get some software loaded onto any computer? On Macs from day one, a program can be installed just by dragging its file from the CD or disk image to the Applications folder or wherever the users keep their programs. I downloaded a program a few days ago and that is all I had to do. That used to work for some Windows programs also.
....I can't see how you could make a 2000 mile transmission 95% efficient....
The main losses in electrical transmission is caused by the resistance of the wires. The power lost goes with the square of the current. To keep the current lower, the voltage is increased. The greater voltage however increases the leakage of the insulators and into the air, especially in damp weather. The noise you hear near a big overland transmission line is corona leakage. Because an AC line must be insulated for the peak which is about 1.41 times the equivalent effective DC voltage, it is possible to ship considerably more power on a DC transmission line. That's why one of the Intertie lines runs at 750KV DC. Even with the AC-DC and back again conversion losses it is a very efficient way to ship enourmous amounts of power from point A to point B.
..... then each generator is just like the disks in a RAID array.....
The fallacy is in comparing the moving around a physical thing like energy to the transmitting of non-physical information bits. Information does not operate by the same rules because it is not physical. It is carried and recorded on physical media but in and of itself it is non physical. Bits can be duplicated, transmitted and stored indefinitely without loss. This is not the case with energy. The laws of physics favor energy conversion on a large scale over a smaller scale. A 500hp diesel engine will ALWAYS be more efficient than a 5HP version.
....I have heard that transmission takes about 20-30% of our electrical output....
Actually, electrical high voltage power transmission is remarkably efficient, around 95% or so. Power from the Columbia River is transmitted at 500KV and 750KV to southern CA on a set of lines called the Pacific Intertie. In the summer, the power runs the airconditioners in CA and in the winter CA ships power to heat the Pacific Northwest.
Building generators in the middle of nowhere isn't nearly the problem as running a major power line across thousands of properties. The big east coast power failure was caused by overloaded transmission lines, not lack of generating capacity. Big power plants need a reliable supply of fuel, a place to reject waste heat, (usually water) and access to transmission facilites to ship the generated power. It is the latter that limits where a major power plant can be put more than the other factors.
....a sufficiently sophisticated distributed control system should be able to handle this....
Unless the grid failure is a very localized failure, the small generator would be instantly overloaded if the utility supply went down. It would disconnect itself from the grid and continue to power the local non-grid connected load. For practical purposes, circuit breakers in the right places would take care of the problem.
....We could build clean energy supply stations where they will be most effective (say the desert for example) and then contain and ship that energy anywhere using fuel cells......
That assumes the total processes of converting the electricity, say generated by solar, in the desert to hydrogen, the energy (trucks or pipe lines) needed to transport to the individual houses and converting that hydrogen back to electricity is over all more efficient and cost effective than putting the power onto the grid and shipping it where needed. In the absence of major trauma, electrical transmission systems require less maintenance than systems that ship and distribute oil or gas, because no mechanical (pumps) components, subject to wear are involved. Transformers and wires have no inherent wear.
In any case, the cost of distributing the energy to the user is a major component of what you pay at the meter.
.....its amazing how frail and utterly devistatable our communications and electrical utilies are....
Why would the distributed generating systems be less frail? With the possible exception of solar generation, the primary energy to run the generator would still have to come from some external source. In most cases that would still be fossil fuels brought in by some sort of transport system. That transport system would still be subject to disruption by large scale disasters. The generators in the hospitals in New Orleans ran out of fuel and there was no way to re-supply them because of the disrupted transport system.
The main advantage of the distributed generation systems is the fact that the heat that is now wasted in distant power plants would be available to the customers. Thousands or even millions of small mechanical generators would likely require more total man hours for maintenance than the present electrical grids. In the absence of disruptive events, most of the non-mechanical transmission components are much more reliable than millions of mechanical generators. Pollution control is also more costly and technologically challenging for millions of micro-generators than a few hundred huge power plants. Maybe, if or when fuel cells become economical, that could change. Even then renewable power generated in sunny deserts or windy places and hydro doesn't mess up the environment anywhere near as much as the consumption of fossil fuels even in fuel cells. Hydrogen is not an energy source, only an energy carrier.
....mythologies such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism....
My point is that those who adhere to the religion of science pretend that their religion is somehow "objective" and therefore true and may be propagated in violation of the separation of church and state. They have convinced our courts and lawmakers of that and so their faith based religion may be openly taught in public schools, whereas all the others are prohibited. Unproven, faith based scientific dogma is the state sponsored religion of the United States of America, to the exclusion of all others. What's so different about that than when the Catholic church was the only one allowed in medieval Europe?
....can sit at home with your thin client and work from there...
He can also sit at home with his PC or Mac. Transit systems ony work well in densely populated places. In the western US the people are spread out too much compared to many other cities. Most people value their time too much to sit for hours on a transit bus. If gas get to be too expensive, people will form car pools before they'll take public transit in these spread out communities.
....They forget that as soon as their PC is full of viruses that the program stops working.....
Only if you user Windows. With a Mac there is yet not even one virus or worm in the wilds of the Internet. Doing backups can be automated. If I want to take my data with me, I just take my laptop and I have it all without worrying where I might get a net connection and whether someone might be sniffing that for my data. If a car crash or errant backhoe interrupts the local net connection, I can still work on all my documents along with everybody else in the office. The Internet's reliability isn't anywhere close to the reliability of the plain old fashioned telephone. Even cell phones drop calls frequently. This idea is nothing more than a modern version of the old mainframe days where there was a central computer and a number of terminals. When the mainframe crashed, the whole business went on hold for a while. That old saw "The network is the computer" won't happen until everybody has an optical fiber connection that is at least as reliable as a normal telphone. That time is still a ways in the future.
....."truth" that cannot be validated or refuted by science....
There are many things in science that cannot be validated or experimentally verified and are therefore religious in nature, at least by your definition. Many aspects of evolution and origins for example. The sudden appearance of fully completed life forms, without the occurrence of the postulated transitions between them are evidence that the religion of evolutionary doctrine is what the proponents want to believe rather than what the evidence shows. No lab experiment has EVER shown macro evolution (not adaptation) nor has anyone ever created life from non-living components, such as making even a "simple" one celled living thing.
Show me ONE "scientific" journal that does not somewhere contain faith words or phrases like "it is assumed", "most scientists believe", "it is believed that...." and other similar expressions. It just happens that the religion of science uses math and computers and constructs "models" based on certain "assumptions", (faith) but doesn't not bill itself as "religion" and is thus allowed to be taught in schools. Science just happens to be the religion of our culture.
Jesus said: "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. " (John 8:36) and He also said: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." There are other kinds of slavery that are usually much worse than the kind of slavery Abe Lincoln was concerned about. Jesus said: " Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin." Outside of marriage sex is like a fire out of place. Fire and sex in their proper settings are positive and good. There all kinds of repetitive sins, commomly called addictions or compulsions that make a person worse off than many slaves were before the civil war. Another modern kind of slavery is excessive debt. How many pople are stuck in job they hate, but can't just quit because they have to pay all of their debs? The wisdom of Solomon tells us: "The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender." (Proverbs 22:7) I hope you are not a slave as defined above.
.....And the truly sick and twisted stuff is better left alone.....
If everybody shunned that porn, there wouldn't be any money in it and that would make it die out. This is also true of drugs and any other "sins" that many people like and are willing to pay hard earned or stolen money for. Artificially, by laws, restricting things that many are willing to pay for and thus enabling the purveyors to make a lot of money will always be counterproductive. The "war on drugs" has failed because there are enough customers to keep the suppliers in business. The "war on pornography" will fail for the same reasons. Prohibition was another example. If there is a demand for a commomdity or service, making it illegal only makes it more expensive, but will never eliminate suppliers thereof. Violent and explicit entertainments of all types will only exist as long as there are paying customers for such. Our prisons are overflowing with people who are there because they were in possession of something that they wanted, but which society said they shouldn't be allowed to have. Why should someone go to prison, for example, if he merely has a shotgun that is shorter than some arbitrary length or in posession of plants and other things which occur naturally?
....I take the bus, you insensitive clod. A car is a luxury....
Your time is probably worthless. Take a bus from Malibu to Anaheinm sometime and see how long that takes. There are many places outside of big cities where there is NO bus or any other public transport. Maybe you live in a high rise in a big city. I used to take the bus and BART when I lived in San Francisco.
....but we also said that about gasoline and everyone's still cruising along....
How can you compare a necessity with a luxury? If there is no gasoline to get to work, there is no money to buy music. With the rising price of fuels, there is less money left over for music or other entertainments, which are luxuries. If the music industry forces Apple to raise the price, they will actually make less money. Jobs is right in that more people will take the chance to download free music rather than paying more money that they now don't even have because they have to spend it on gas. It has been amply demonstrated that many people don't much care whether the music on their iPod is legal or not, epecially if the purveyors of the music are perceived as greedy fat cats. Apple may sell fewer iPods, but the music industry will sell a lot fewer songs.
...the paper must be acid-free and the inks must be long-lasting.....
Something printed on good acid free paper by a laser printer ought to be pretty durable maybe? How well does the toner fused to the paper stay legible for a long time provided the paper stays intact?
.....A very obvious principle of security is that the less popular something is, the less interest there is in exploiting it......
Well OK if that is true, I hope the Mac never becomes too popular, say never above 10% so I and all other Mac users can ignore the all the worms and viruses that plague Windows users and enjoy our security through obscurity. I also hope that MS fixes some of the security problems with VISTA and that finally Windows users too, will enjoy the blessed rest we Mac and Linux users have from malware. I have some Windows computers also and those have to be carefully set up and monitored and for some purposes these work better than the Macs.
If the thieves don't know that I have the Hope Diamond in my closet, they won't try to break in and steal it. So maybe there is a good case for security through obscurity.
.....If you're talking about executable attachments in e-mail, that's an issue for the e-mail software,.....
You cannot attach an executeable file to an e-mail and expect it to run on a Mac upon opening the attachment or download from the web. That only works in Windows. On a Mac you have to put the various components of a program into a zip or dmg file which then can be unzipped into an application package. If an attempt is made to install the unzipped program folder, an admin password must be entered. In a business, school or many other environments the user would not know that. Even if the user wants to run the program in his/her own user space, the user is warned that the program may be malicious before it is run. In short, OSX puts a number of obstacles which a determined user must get around before malware can run.
Also, unlike Windows, where malware can hide almost anywhere on a HD, nasty files can only go into a few places where they can easily be found and trashed. A determined non admin user can, with effort get a malware to run, but that will then only affect that users space but not the system and other users.
In windows there is a useless thing called the registry, which any malware can mess up and it requires an extremely knowledgeable person to repair a screwed up registry. If the registry is messed up enough, the computer won't even boot. There is no such single point of failure and attack in OSX unless the user has root access. There are root kits for OSX, but they cannot be installed by any standard user or a program he/she may run. The sad fact is that in Windows, any program can be installed and run without warning to the user because most users MUST run as administrator because Windows developers don't seem to heed MS guidelines and almost every user I know has at least one program that will not run unless the user has full root equivalent admin rights. When I was a system admin for our local school district, I was stymied again and again by the fact that a large number of Windows programs would not work correctly if I set up the users with limited rights. I sincerely hope that in VISTA MS finally forces developers to write code that does NOT require root access in order to function correctly. That ONE change will make Windows a much more secure system. Windows, since NT has very good user rights management, but that did not much good because everyone runs as root. For once I hope MS chooses security over compatibility with old programs that require users to run as root.
There is a huge difference between a theoretical vulnerability and the practical every day exploits. Popularity has nothing to do with that. If that were the case, the Apache web server should be exploited more than the MS IIS equivalent. Popularity has nothing to do with security. It is an UNCONTESTABLE FACT that out of the box, OSX is much more secure than any flavor of Windows. Any security professional, even avid MS advocates will admit that if they are truthful. However, Windows CAN be made quite secure if the user can still be productive with limited system access rights and is set up properly by a knowledgable person.
....Ok, how about sendmail vulnerabilities? What about fetchmail ones? Does checking email (which users does regularly) not count? What about the Quicktime url bug which works just by inserting a malformed url?.....
Getting unknown software to EXCECUTE and messing up a Mac is not easy, especially if the user is not logged as an admin. Even then, a user is warned that file xxx contains a program that wants to run for the first time and that it could be evil. If the user is an admin ad gives the password in spite of all that, then they have coming whatever happens. The problem in Windows is that the user is told NOTHING and the program executes and installs remote control back doors and who knows what. I do not know of ONE Mac that has EVER been made into a spam spewing zombie by some lind of network introduced malware. If it CAN be done ot must ber VERY hard, since no one has done it yet.
....Thus the program that requires the user to run as administrator is defective....
You and I certainly agree that is true, but in order for a court to agree to that there would have to be some law that defines software needing admin rights as being defective or illegal. I know of no such law, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.
MS has to throw out backwards compatibility for all software that requires admin capability unless it actually NEEDS to make change or addition to the system, such as a device driver. This will make a lot of people mad, because they'll have to upgrade most of their programs, often at considerable expense. For some businesses it might be almost impossible if they are dependent on a program whose maker has gone out of existence.
The result could be that many will not buy the new OS and its usually required hardware upgrade. Thus there is a distinct possibility that VISTA users will still need to have admin rights because that is the only way the old software will run. That will in turn mean that the new OS will still be insecure for these users.
In OSX, each successive version upgrade has improved performance on the same old hardware, whereas on Windows the opposite is true. From what I've heard, the hardware requirements for VISTA will be substantially more than the average computer has today. Of course, PC vendors will love that.
....And saying the iPod is the best audio player to an audiophile would be analogous to.....
So then in your opinion, who makes the best sounding portable player that can play most downloadable formats? I suspect that most people's ears are not golden enough to tell the difference between the ipod and most others. Real audiophiles would not spend serious listening time to any of the lossy compressed recordings. They'll tell you that direct to disk vinyl is the best and a good CD can be pretty close.
...... too bad only the elementary school games run on Macs......
Actually, there are a number of fun games our teen-ager runs on his Mac. His current favorite is called Battlefield 1942. The Myst series is quite entertaining for those who don't like shoot-em-ups.
For avid gamers though a console is a far better and cheaper choice.
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.....You are trying to tell me that if I wrote an editor to edit .zag files and compiled it on MacOSX that MacOSX would automagically know that my program reads .zag files and would use it to open all .zag files.......
.zag file, the system will start your program and tell it to read in that file.
No, you would have to tell your program to notify your system upon first run what suffix and/or hidden creator and type codes your program understands. After that, if the user wants to open a
I am not a programmer intimately knowledgeable about the internal details of OSX, but I do know that many, if not most of the programs I added to my system do NOT need to run any kind of installation program. Even Microsoft office is just simple drag and drop from the original CD. System updates and some programs use installers, but whether or not that is so, is up to the program developer. This has always been that way at least from system 7 on. An installer can be used, but it is an optional choice of the programmers. I had some old Windows 95 programs that also simply had to be copied from the source disk to the HD. Installers were needed back then mostly to stitch all the parts of a larger program together from multiple floppy disks. Today, where software is distributed on spacious media, special installer programs are an echo from the past.
....picked up a CD, opened it,....
Most CDs are sealed with some type of shrink wrap. The store may not be able to sell a CD the seal of which has been ripped away. Therefore a real loss has ocurred. No seal was broken on a downloaded copy and so there was no loss.
.....Generally, An installer will:.....
That rigamarole is neccessary for Windows, but not for Macs. Macs don't have a registry. When Mac users drag an icon of a program from a CD or disk image to any mounted drive they have write permission to, all the files that program needs are copied at the same time. User specific settings and values are established upon the first run of that program by that user. That information is stored in the users LIBRARY folder. Registration information or codes, if any, are entered at first run and get stored with the program so that all users that have access to it may use it.
Mac programs also "know" what files types they can open. Macs can, but don't have to use a three or four letter file extension. There are hidden type and creator codes that can tell the system which program to use for any file. If the system cannot find a program that it "'thinks" can open a given file, the user is given the opportunity to make an educated guess. There is no need to normally associate file types with programs, although if several programs can open a certain kind of file, the user may set which program should be the default. There are many Mac programs that do use an installer program, but most do not.
Because Mac programs are not scattered all over a HD, uninstallation is done by simply dragging the unwanted program icon into the trash. Device drivers, because they are embedded deeper in the sytem than applications, often do have an uninstall program just to make it easier for the user.
....Making the need to download installers for free software an extra effort....
Why does there have to be some special installer program just to get some software loaded onto any computer? On Macs from day one, a program can be installed just by dragging its file from the CD or disk image to the Applications folder or wherever the users keep their programs. I downloaded a program a few days ago and that is all I had to do. That used to work for some Windows programs also.
....I can't see how you could make a 2000 mile transmission 95% efficient....
The main losses in electrical transmission is caused by the resistance of the wires. The power lost goes with the square of the current. To keep the current lower, the voltage is increased. The greater voltage however increases the leakage of the insulators and into the air, especially in damp weather. The noise you hear near a big overland transmission line is corona leakage. Because an AC line must be insulated for the peak which is about 1.41 times the equivalent effective DC voltage, it is possible to ship considerably more power on a DC transmission line. That's why one of the Intertie lines runs at 750KV DC. Even with the AC-DC and back again conversion losses it is a very efficient way to ship enourmous amounts of power from point A to point B.
..... then each generator is just like the disks in a RAID array.....
The fallacy is in comparing the moving around a physical thing like energy to the transmitting of non-physical information bits. Information does not operate by the same rules because it is not physical. It is carried and recorded on physical media but in and of itself it is non physical. Bits can be duplicated, transmitted and stored indefinitely without loss. This is not the case with energy. The laws of physics favor energy conversion on a large scale over a smaller scale. A 500hp diesel engine will ALWAYS be more efficient than a 5HP version.
....I have heard that transmission takes about 20-30% of our electrical output....
Actually, electrical high voltage power transmission is remarkably efficient, around 95% or so. Power from the Columbia River is transmitted at 500KV and 750KV to southern CA on a set of lines called the Pacific Intertie. In the summer, the power runs the airconditioners in CA and in the winter CA ships power to heat the Pacific Northwest.
Building generators in the middle of nowhere isn't nearly the problem as running a major power line across thousands of properties. The big east coast power failure was caused by overloaded transmission lines, not lack of generating capacity. Big power plants need a reliable supply of fuel, a place to reject waste heat, (usually water) and access to transmission facilites to ship the generated power. It is the latter that limits where a major power plant can be put more than the other factors.
....a sufficiently sophisticated distributed control system should be able to handle this....
Unless the grid failure is a very localized failure, the small generator would be instantly overloaded if the utility supply went down. It would disconnect itself from the grid and continue to power the local non-grid connected load. For practical purposes, circuit breakers in the right places would take care of the problem.
....We could build clean energy supply stations where they will be most effective (say the desert for example) and then contain and ship that energy anywhere using fuel cells......
That assumes the total processes of converting the electricity, say generated by solar, in the desert to hydrogen, the energy (trucks or pipe lines) needed to transport to the individual houses and converting that hydrogen back to electricity is over all more efficient and cost effective than putting the power onto the grid and shipping it where needed. In the absence of major trauma, electrical transmission systems require less maintenance than systems that ship and distribute oil or gas, because no mechanical (pumps) components, subject to wear are involved. Transformers and wires have no inherent wear.
In any case, the cost of distributing the energy to the user is a major component of what you pay at the meter.
.....its amazing how frail and utterly devistatable our communications and electrical utilies are....
Why would the distributed generating systems be less frail? With the possible exception of solar generation, the primary energy to run the generator would still have to come from some external source. In most cases that would still be fossil fuels brought in by some sort of transport system. That transport system would still be subject to disruption by large scale disasters. The generators in the hospitals in New Orleans ran out of fuel and there was no way to re-supply them because of the disrupted transport system.
The main advantage of the distributed generation systems is the fact that the heat that is now wasted in distant power plants would be available to the customers. Thousands or even millions of small mechanical generators would likely require more total man hours for maintenance than the present electrical grids. In the absence of disruptive events, most of the non-mechanical transmission components are much more reliable than millions of mechanical generators. Pollution control is also more costly and technologically challenging for millions of micro-generators than a few hundred huge power plants. Maybe, if or when fuel cells become economical, that could change. Even then renewable power generated in sunny deserts or windy places and hydro doesn't mess up the environment anywhere near as much as the consumption of fossil fuels even in fuel cells. Hydrogen is not an energy source, only an energy carrier.
....mythologies such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism....
My point is that those who adhere to the religion of science pretend that their religion is somehow "objective" and therefore true and may be propagated in violation of the separation of church and state. They have convinced our courts and lawmakers of that and so their faith based religion may be openly taught in public schools, whereas all the others are prohibited. Unproven, faith based scientific dogma is the state sponsored religion of the United States of America, to the exclusion of all others. What's so different about that than when the Catholic church was the only one allowed in medieval Europe?
....can sit at home with your thin client and work from there...
He can also sit at home with his PC or Mac. Transit systems ony work well in densely populated places. In the western US the people are spread out too much compared to many other cities. Most people value their time too much to sit for hours on a transit bus. If gas get to be too expensive, people will form car pools before they'll take public transit in these spread out communities.
....They forget that as soon as their PC is full of viruses that the program stops working.....
Only if you user Windows. With a Mac there is yet not even one virus or worm in the wilds of the Internet. Doing backups can be automated. If I want to take my data with me, I just take my laptop and I have it all without worrying where I might get a net connection and whether someone might be sniffing that for my data. If a car crash or errant backhoe interrupts the local net connection, I can still work on all my documents along with everybody else in the office. The Internet's reliability isn't anywhere close to the reliability of the plain old fashioned telephone. Even cell phones drop calls frequently. This idea is nothing more than a modern version of the old mainframe days where there was a central computer and a number of terminals. When the mainframe crashed, the whole business went on hold for a while. That old saw "The network is the computer" won't happen until everybody has an optical fiber connection that is at least as reliable as a normal telphone. That time is still a ways in the future.
....."truth" that cannot be validated or refuted by science....
There are many things in science that cannot be validated or experimentally verified and are therefore religious in nature, at least by your definition. Many aspects of evolution and origins for example. The sudden appearance of fully completed life forms, without the occurrence of the postulated transitions between them are evidence that the religion of evolutionary doctrine is what the proponents want to believe rather than what the evidence shows. No lab experiment has EVER shown macro evolution (not adaptation) nor has anyone ever created life from non-living components, such as making even a "simple" one celled living thing.
Show me ONE "scientific" journal that does not somewhere contain faith words or phrases like "it is assumed", "most scientists believe", "it is believed that...." and other similar expressions. It just happens that the religion of science uses math and computers and constructs "models" based on certain "assumptions", (faith) but doesn't not bill itself as "religion" and is thus allowed to be taught in schools. Science just happens to be the religion of our culture.
.....Jesus wouldn't free the slaves....
Jesus said: "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. " (John 8:36) and He also said: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
There are other kinds of slavery that are usually much worse than the kind of slavery Abe Lincoln was concerned about. Jesus said: " Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin." Outside of marriage sex is like a fire out of place. Fire and sex in their proper settings are positive and good.
There all kinds of repetitive sins, commomly called addictions or compulsions that make a person worse off than many slaves were before the civil war.
Another modern kind of slavery is excessive debt. How many pople are stuck in job they hate, but can't just quit because they have to pay all of their debs? The wisdom of Solomon tells us: "The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender." (Proverbs 22:7) I hope you are not a slave as defined above.
.....And the truly sick and twisted stuff is better left alone. ....
If everybody shunned that porn, there wouldn't be any money in it and that would make it die out. This is also true of drugs and any other "sins" that many people like and are willing to pay hard earned or stolen money for. Artificially, by laws, restricting things that many are willing to pay for and thus enabling the purveyors to make a lot of money will always be counterproductive. The "war on drugs" has failed because there are enough customers to keep the suppliers in business. The "war on pornography" will fail for the same reasons. Prohibition was another example. If there is a demand for a commomdity or service, making it illegal only makes it more expensive, but will never eliminate suppliers thereof. Violent and explicit entertainments of all types will only exist as long as there are paying customers for such. Our prisons are overflowing with people who are there because they were in possession of something that they wanted, but which society said they shouldn't be allowed to have. Why should someone go to prison, for example, if he merely has a shotgun that is shorter than some arbitrary length or in posession of plants and other things which occur naturally?
....I take the bus, you insensitive clod. A car is a luxury....
Your time is probably worthless. Take a bus from Malibu to Anaheinm sometime and see how long that takes. There are many places outside of big cities where there is NO bus or any other public transport. Maybe you live in a high rise in a big city. I used to take the bus and BART when I lived in San Francisco.
....but we also said that about gasoline and everyone's still cruising along....
How can you compare a necessity with a luxury? If there is no gasoline to get to work, there is no money to buy music. With the rising price of fuels, there is less money left over for music or other entertainments, which are luxuries. If the music industry forces Apple to raise the price, they will actually make less money. Jobs is right in that more people will take the chance to download free music rather than paying more money that they now don't even have because they have to spend it on gas. It has been amply demonstrated that many people don't much care whether the music on their iPod is legal or not, epecially if the purveyors of the music are perceived as greedy fat cats. Apple may sell fewer iPods, but the music industry will sell a lot fewer songs.
...the paper must be acid-free and the inks must be long-lasting.....
Something printed on good acid free paper by a laser printer ought to be pretty durable maybe? How well does the toner fused to the paper stay legible for a long time provided the paper stays intact?
.....A very obvious principle of security is that the less popular something is, the less interest there is in exploiting it......
Well OK if that is true, I hope the Mac never becomes too popular, say never above 10% so I and all other Mac users can ignore the all the worms and viruses that plague Windows users and enjoy our security through obscurity. I also hope that MS fixes some of the security problems with VISTA and that finally Windows users too, will enjoy the blessed rest we Mac and Linux users have from malware. I have some Windows computers also and those have to be carefully set up and monitored and for some purposes these work better than the Macs.
If the thieves don't know that I have the Hope Diamond in my closet, they won't try to break in and steal it. So maybe there is a good case for security through obscurity.
.....If you're talking about executable attachments in e-mail, that's an issue for the e-mail software,.....
You cannot attach an executeable file to an e-mail and expect it to run on a Mac upon opening the attachment or download from the web. That only works in Windows. On a Mac you have to put the various components of a program into a zip or dmg file which then can be unzipped into an application package. If an attempt is made to install the unzipped program folder, an admin password must be entered. In a business, school or many other environments the user would not know that. Even if the user wants to run the program in his/her own user space, the user is warned that the program may be malicious before it is run. In short, OSX puts a number of obstacles which a determined user must get around before malware can run.
Also, unlike Windows, where malware can hide almost anywhere on a HD, nasty files can only go into a few places where they can easily be found and trashed. A determined non admin user can, with effort get a malware to run, but that will then only affect that users space but not the system and other users.
In windows there is a useless thing called the registry, which any malware can mess up and it requires an extremely knowledgeable person to repair a screwed up registry. If the registry is messed up enough, the computer won't even boot. There is no such single point of failure and attack in OSX unless the user has root access. There are root kits for OSX, but they cannot be installed by any standard user or a program he/she may run. The sad fact is that in Windows, any program can be installed and run without warning to the user because most users MUST run as administrator because Windows developers don't seem to heed MS guidelines and almost every user I know has at least one program that will not run unless the user has full root equivalent admin rights. When I was a system admin for our local school district, I was stymied again and again by the fact that a large number of Windows programs would not work correctly if I set up the users with limited rights. I sincerely hope that in VISTA MS finally forces developers to write code that does NOT require root access in order to function correctly. That ONE change will make Windows a much more secure system. Windows, since NT has very good user rights management, but that did not much good because everyone runs as root. For once I hope MS chooses security over compatibility with old programs that require users to run as root.
There is a huge difference between a theoretical vulnerability and the practical every day exploits. Popularity has nothing to do with that. If that were the case, the Apache web server should be exploited more than the MS IIS equivalent. Popularity has nothing to do with security. It is an UNCONTESTABLE FACT that out of the box, OSX is much more secure than any flavor of Windows. Any security professional, even avid MS advocates will admit that if they are truthful. However, Windows CAN be made quite secure if the user can still be productive with limited system access rights and is set up properly by a knowledgable person.
....Ok, how about sendmail vulnerabilities? What about fetchmail ones? Does checking email (which users does regularly) not count? What about the Quicktime url bug which works just by inserting a malformed url?.....
Getting unknown software to EXCECUTE and messing up a Mac is not easy, especially if the user is not logged as an admin. Even then, a user is warned that file xxx contains a program that wants to run for the first time and that it could be evil. If the user is an admin ad gives the password in spite of all that, then they have coming whatever happens. The problem in Windows is that the user is told NOTHING and the program executes and installs remote control back doors and who knows what. I do not know of ONE Mac that has EVER been made into a spam spewing zombie by some lind of network introduced malware. If it CAN be done ot must ber VERY hard, since no one has done it yet.
....Thus the program that requires the user to run as administrator is defective....
You and I certainly agree that is true, but in order for a court to agree to that there would have to be some law that defines software needing admin rights as being defective or illegal. I know of no such law, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.
MS has to throw out backwards compatibility for all software that requires admin capability unless it actually NEEDS to make change or addition to the system, such as a device driver. This will make a lot of people mad, because they'll have to upgrade most of their programs, often at considerable expense. For some businesses it might be almost impossible if they are dependent on a program whose maker has gone out of existence.
The result could be that many will not buy the new OS and its usually required hardware upgrade. Thus there is a distinct possibility that VISTA users will still need to have admin rights because that is the only way the old software will run. That will in turn mean that the new OS will still be insecure for these users.
In OSX, each successive version upgrade has improved performance on the same old hardware, whereas on Windows the opposite is true. From what I've heard, the hardware requirements for VISTA will be substantially more than the average computer has today. Of course, PC vendors will love that.
....And saying the iPod is the best audio player to an audiophile would be analogous to.....
So then in your opinion, who makes the best sounding portable player that can play most downloadable formats? I suspect that most people's ears are not golden enough to tell the difference between the ipod and most others. Real audiophiles would not spend serious listening time to any of the lossy compressed recordings. They'll tell you that direct to disk vinyl is the best and a good CD can be pretty close.
...... too bad only the elementary school games run on Macs ......
Actually, there are a number of fun games our teen-ager runs on his Mac. His current favorite is called Battlefield 1942. The Myst series is quite entertaining for those who don't like shoot-em-ups.
For avid gamers though a console is a far better and cheaper choice.